A scene from Melt, a multimedia dance work
that explores encounters between Tibetan Buddhist iconography
and technology.

An interactive multimedia
performance festival, “Art
Meets Science,” on Thursday and Friday, April 10 and
11, will underscore the common ground between these two broad
disciplines.

The events are free and open to the public.

The event opens on April 10
with an interactive performance workshop, at 4:30 p.m. in
Hallie Flanagan Theatre, Mendenhall Center, led by Jamie
Jewett, of Lostwax Productions, a multimedia dance company,
and Thomas Cuifo, artist-in-residence in arts and technology
at Smith. They will discuss and demonstrate various strategies
and approaches to interactive music and multimedia dance
performance.

The festival will continue on
Friday, April 11, with a performance, at 7 p.m., also in
Hallie Flanagan Theatre, featuring interactive electronic
music by composer/improviser Curtis Bahn on the eSitar/eDilruba,
and Ciufo playing various computer-extended instruments.
The performance will also feature Melt, a multimedia
dance work, created by Lostwax, that explores the encounter
between Tibetan Buddhist iconography and contemporary technology
to reveal a language of idiosyncratic movement in an interactive
installation of music, hieroglyph and ice.

Thomas Ciufo

Curtis Bahn

The recently established
Arts and Technology interdisciplinary program at Smith
engages students and faculty from across the campus and
from all three academic divisions. The emphasis is on Arts—plural—including
visual art, music, dance, theater, and film, and on Technology,
broadly conceived, including computer science, engineering,
mathematics and statistics, physics, and other interested
departments.